Programmer Art 2.0

Well I’ve had a couple of pretty busy weeks and as you can tell, it hasn’t been due to any of the little projects I’ve posted here… but that’s not entirely true.

I’ve been messing around a little more with RPM, cleaning up and moving some things over from the untitled “Zombie” project to be included in the engine. Most of that will be some of the smaller objects and pooling managers, as well as the UI system. In the process I realized that the UI system hasn’t been designed entirely up to what I’ll need.

Instead of working on it out of band (because that’s boring and hard to show any improvements) I’ll instead do a little work on it from within another small game project.

I spent most of the night tonight working on some little sprite sheets (and a better workflow for creating them efficiently, which has already helped immensely). The two possible game projects are two simple side-scroller games.

One is sort of like your straight-up space shooter, with an emphasis on, you guessed it, procedural content.

The other is a little more like a platformer / super-spy game. Both of these have less restrictive UI requirements and will let me build the engine’s UI system to support in-game heads up displays and inventory implementations. I think from there I’ll be able to extend the UI to do more interesting context sensitive things, required for build menus and deep dives on information.

I’m also going for 16×16 sprites (that’s 4x the resolution I’ve already been working with so far!) so it will force me to pay a little more attention to some of the art. But I think in the end that will leave me a little more room for details, and just to have fun with some of the tiles.

Stay tuned for more details. I’ll probably spend another day working on more of the placeholder art before I dive into one of two implementations.